Why it works: Lettuce and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,483 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓
Cheese Salad
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Mash one-sixth of a Neufchâtel cheese and moisten it with cream.
Shape the mixture into forms the size of a robin's egg.
Serve
Arrange the cheese shapes on a lettuce leaf.
Sprinkle with finely chopped dried parsley.
Serve with salad dressing.
Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.
Explore the science
The flavor team
The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.
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Lettuce + parsleytop 5% of all pairsSmell alikestrongCooked together1,483 recipes
Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
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Cheese + creamtop 15% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together2,655 recipes
Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).
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Cheese + lettucetop 18% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together614 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
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Cheese + parsleytop 25% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together1,507 recipes
Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).
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Cream + lettucetop 26% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together1,121 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Neufchâtel cheese
- Provides the creamy, soft base that holds the salad together.
- Cream
- Adds moisture so the mashed cheese becomes soft and easy to shape.
The step that matters
Moistening the cheese with cream. Adding cream gradually until the mixture is soft but still holds its shape keeps the cheese from becoming too wet to form neat balls or too stiff to mould smoothly.
Swap the parsley
How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cheese, cream, lettuce):
- Capersfits better
- Tarragonfits better
- Celeryfits better
- Parsleythe original
Fit is the average pairing score against cheese, cream, lettuce. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.
“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.
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